The Sentinel-3 Toolbox consists of a rich set of visualisation, analysis and processing tools for the exploitation of OLCI and SLSTR data from the upcoming Sentinel-3 mission. As a multi-mission remote sensing toolbox, it also supports the ESA missions Envisat (MERIS & AATSR), ERS (ATSR), SMOS as well as third party data from MODIS (Aqua and Terra), Landsat (TM), ALOS (AVNIR & PRISM) and others. The various tools can be run from an intuitive desktop application or via a command-line interface. A rich application programming interface allows for development of plugins using Java or Python.

The Sentinel-3 Toolbox is being developed for ESA by Brockmann Consult in partnership with the University of Reading, C-S France, ACRI-ST and Array.

This first release of the Sentinel-3 Toolbox is a stand-alone toolbox intended for exploitation of medium resolution optical and SMOS data. It provides all tools known from the ESA BEAM and SMOS toolboxes, plus a Sentinel-3 data reader, an uncertainty data visualisation tool and a context search feature. The next release will consist of a common Sentinel Application Platform (SNAP) for Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 with a single installer and application interface.

Sample products are available on the Scientific HUB at "scihub.copernicus.eu". Auto-registration is required for accessing the server.

Sentinel-3 Test Data (July 2015)

New Sentinel-3 Test Data Sets have been produced using MERIS and AATSR data. These data provide realistic features (land, sea, cloud) but they also contain some limitations due to the input data (AATSR and MERIS swath, missing spectral channels copied or interpolated from existing channels).

These Test Data Sets provide a good overview of what the future Sentinel-3 optical missions products will be like.

Disclaimer

Access to the Sentinel-3 OLCI/SLSTR Test Data Set (TDS) constitutes acceptance of the following general terms and conditions:

The data are released as preliminary data set on an "as is" basis to be used only with appropriate caution as the Sentinel-3 products format and content are under finalisation. The data have not been subjected to the ESA quality control or quality assurance procedures and do not meet the criteria and standards of official ESA data. ESA reserves the right to revise the data format and content at any time pursuant to further analysis and review. Neither ESA nor any other party involved in creating, producing or delivering the data shall be held liable for any consequences arising from the use of this data.

To acces the Test Data Set with a ftp client, please use the following details:

ftp = ftp.acri-cwa.fr

user = ftp_tds-s3mpc

password =smwF298B

Open Source Development

The Sentinel Toolboxes and full source code is distributed freely under the GNU GPL license.

Open source makes software inherently independent of specific vendors, programmers and suppliers. The software can be freely distributed and shared by large communities including the source code and the right to modify it. This ensures that there isn't a single entity on which the future of the software depends on and allows for unlimited improvements and tuning of the quality and functionality of the software.

As open source, future evolution and growth of the toolboxes will be possible by the community of users and developers that contribute back to the project.